4 Elements Every Real Estate Website Needs

When your real estate agency has been established long enough that you need your own website, you have some major factors to consider. Typically, consumers will visit your site to search for homes, research the market, estimate their current home’s worth, and investigate the pros and cons of a given neighborhood.

But they can only get the answers to their questions if your website is easy to read and understand. If it’s not, you won’t attract much attention … not for very long, anyhow.

No matter how much marketing you employ, it won’t get anywhere without a well-designed website. As you work on building your clientele, here are four of the most vital elements to include in your site.

Amazing LIsting Photos

Nothing sells real estate better than the photography. “When it comes to real estate, pictures, images, and visuals provide far more value than words,” says a blog post from Green Residential, a property management company in Houston.

“Whereas written and spoken words only describe a property, pictures tell the entire story.” For that reason, optimizing your real-estate website in terms of the photography is a must. Your site needs to be able to support the inclusion of high-quality photos and galleries so users can view everything unhindered.

Integration

Integration is another major facet of online real estate marketing. Websites that are integrated with Google Maps make it easy for consumers to research the neighborhood for each property of interest and check the location.

Since location is one of the most important aspects of the property search among most home buyers, this is an extremely useful tool that your clients will highly value.

Integration with social media, particularly Facebook, is also important. This enables visitors to share and access your pages more freely, to spread the reach of your brand. Using social sharing buttons on your website is a great way to achieve this.

Blog Functionality

Most real-estate agents blog as a part of their marketing strategy. It improves the search engine optimization of a website and provides useful content for consumers.

“The overall purpose of a real estate website is to advertise properties and encourage would-be buyers to get in touch,” says a blog post from Modeaweb, a website design company in the UK. “Ultimately you want the website to act like a lead generation machine, convincing potential clients to arrange a viewing, or to list their properties with you.”

A blog is one of the best ways to provide that essential information. It’s easily updated and enables direct content marketing.

Great Navigation

Making sure your web visitors can get where they need to go is essential for any website. Because consumers tend to visit real estate sites in search of information, navigation is even more important.

According to research, more than 50 percent of web visitors will use the navigation bar to orient themselves on a website. Without a clear, easy-to-use navigation bar, there’s nothing to help ground them and lead them to what they’re looking for.

Since competition is usually high in the real estate business, a bad navigation bar can make visitors abandon your site and pursue another.

Never underestimate the worth of a great website for any business. Websites can be made to match any specific industry, and real estate is no exception. With a great site design, you should be able to build your clientele and increase your online presence.